Basement Renovation - How to Combat Basement Moisture - Bob Vila eps.3401

hi I'm Bob Vila welcome to the show we've got a brand new project today in a little house in the town of Melrose outside of Boston where a young family with two little boys needs a playroom we're gonna be showing you how to finish the basement to get just that including how you clean it out and how you're waterproof it stick around suburban real-estate values outside of cities like New York Boston San Francisco have skyrocketed in value in the last few years that's nothing new but we're in Melrose a community that's been a suburb for over a century since the railroad came out here and connected it to downtown Boston Boston is only seven miles away so that makes it very desirable but it is a dense neighborhood and that's alleviated somewhat by the fact that we have a state reservation lots of open land lots of other reasons why it's an attractive community it's got great school systems and I suppose one of the things that makes it attractive too is the housing stock there are lots of beautiful antique houses mixed in with turn-of-the-century houses Linda Ogonowski has grown up in this area she's also been a real estate broker for a couple of decades let's talk with her about this one hi Linda hey nice to meet you Bob dimitru now you grew up in this neighborhood right I did an idyllic childhood right here back in the 60s I guess I'm not old yeah what was it like uh back in the 60s this was the day of we were polyester Danskin suits you know Dustin Hoffman adjust to notes in the Graduate it was time for polyester and plastic and there were nine kids between the two families we were good close friends all born in the 60s so the your house was just down the street and did you play in this place all the time this is where we had our science experiments on the porch with all those grasshopper experiments the ladybugs the seances in the basement the bobbing for apples tell us about the house though it's from what 1921 1921 beautiful gambrel some nice natural road work inside had chance to sell this to Ricardo and Sarah just a few years ago right and I really sold them my childhood as well as long I see it now there has been appreciation in the last few years right there's been some great appreciation there might be softening in the market or an adjustment but at the same time they've had great equity in this house right and the interior of the house is finely detailed is probably a builders house it I don't think it was architect design but there's a very nice touches in there yeah there's a couple sister houses in the neighborhood that have that same nice natural woodwork the pretty columns and details that you'll find here but it does make sense to make improvements to the house even though the lot doesn't really allow for expansion well being seven miles north of Boston there's not a lot of land here and it makes a lot of sense to use that built space wisely and that old basement where we had our ping-pong tournaments is gonna really lend itself to a great project for the mons owns great it's a good idea Thanks you're very welcome okay our homeowners Sarah and Ricardo have been here about five years and they're do-it-yourselfers so they've made quite a few improvements to the property including some of the landscaping work let's say hi to Sarah hi Bob this is very impressive I mean this is do-it-yourself stonework it's really a retaining wall that you put up here yeah this is something that we did three years ago because the yard event originally was just a big slope coming with brambles the kids couldn't play back here so we just carved out the slope and put in stone that we got locally it comes from Yankee walls this is a big job you did look at all this yeah yeah took about a month yeah and you've put up lots of nice plant material up there which eventually give you some privacy from the neighbors yep what's the story with uh well we with the lawn or rather with the we used to have grasses and the kids came out here and they just truck all over this so old early they're four and five oh wow so it's never gonna come back and we're looking for solutions yeah yeah that's one of the problems and and then you don't seem to have any fencing right exactly we are kind of on top of our neighbors over there we have a house that is fortunately full of people that we love but it's all apartments and we have a right-of-way on the other side so it you know my main concern would be the busy street and a four and a five-year-old like when I fence this and it looks like you have been doing some work on the yeah on the house yeah last summer I had to rip down a soffit at the very top there cuz it was full of squirrel and birds nests uh-huh and I rebuild that and we we still haven't finished but this whole wall tends to mildew and there's a lot of moisture infiltration problems okay when we had the rains a few weeks ago we had about nine or eleven inches of rain in the space of a couple of days yes and a lot of people got terrible flooding this house which never floods got two inches two inches in the base in the basement and I saw some of it coming in through back here we have some issues with water infiltration it's never been that big a problem most rain bricks that need pointing and that sort of thing yes and there's a concrete and stucco union that is dubious that we need to have work but the big project here is expanding the house into the basement right yes I mean it's one thing to have a nice yard in the back but it's small and we do need interior space for the kids it's a big you know it's an open-plan house but it's not that big right and we did have a big open basement and it was a great opportunity for us to expand downward okay um so and you only have one bathroom in the house so it's also an opportunity to add another bath yeah that's that's a huge deal you know in a house with two boys so what is it what have you had to do so far well it started out it was full up to the joist with stuff that we'd moved with my husband's a musician so we had drums down there we had all kinds of boxes of books and furniture and old appliances and stuff we'd moved with and it was a disaster I'm sure everybody in the world knows about cleaning out the basement it has to be the worst job in the worst hardest yeah how did you do it we just went through everything piled it in the middle yeah and then we called 1-800 got junk and they came and believe it or not they took everything really yes but before they could do that we had to get a few things disconnected that you can't just pick up a washer and take it out and we had a 400 pound soapstone set sink down there for laundry once upon a time that was 80 years old and pitted and disgusting and so our plumber a Leoni came and he disconnected that lead drain that was held on with duct tape and he took a look at our plumbing museum he's gonna be working with us more later but we have brass pipe down there and it was corroding at the joints and the threads are not the same so he had to use an adapter to get the new caps to fit the old pipes it was quite a it's a banishing we also had somebody come in to assess the situation with the stairs and demolish the old paint closet underneath so we're gonna take this partition out by making a cut right here and then ripping out the board the first and glaring issue is this stringer right here which is completely unsupported seems to be hanging from this beadboard somehow so we're gonna put a post down to the floor here and then the only other thing we can really do is try and secure these treads a little bit better to their risers and stiffen up the staircase that way finally we called 1-800 GOT JUNK and they came in and it was amazing they took everything even the construction waste we generated from the demolition the appliances the heavy disgusting set tub they took it all we're the world's largest junk removal service all you have to do is call the 800 number and will arrive within a 2 hour time window once we arrive you show us the junk that you have just point to it and we'll do all the loading for you we take furniture appliances construction debris yard debris we'll take anything non hazardous and we'll come over without we have a set pricing and we'll explain the pricing before we start and then once once we take care of the pricing then we start loading and then you don't the lift a finger we make daily trips to Salvation Army goodwill and a variety of other charities daily we go to these places we stack our trucks in such a way that once we leave your house we go to 3-volt places to dispose of everything because we recycle and donate 60 70 percent of what we take on average and so what we do is we'll drive to Goodwill in Salvation Army like I said almost every day and they love us we pull in they just oh my god here they come because we're we're donating a lot of this up we're not into reselling things we're into donating and recycling and in the old days everything went into a dumpster and never got recycled not with us everything gets stacked sorted methodically and then disposed of properly well our prices are set which is nice because it's the same price for everybody for everything you have we have a set price for every level on the truck so it depends on how much you have so if you only have a little and we pay a little and you don't pay for any more than what you have so the prices start at one twenty four four just to fill up the smallest amount of the truck then they go up from there it's very simple people will see our phone number or one of our trucks when they call the 1-800 GOT JUNK number you can also book online 24 hours a day and you can you can call the 800 number 24 hours a day also to book your appointment it's the cheapest way to add space to your house well since we've been in business we've heard word that the amount of waste going to transfer stations and landfills has decreased since we've been in business and it's unofficial word but but we do recycle so much that before we were in business everything went into a dumpster and then into a landfill and now there's over 40 or 50 trucks in New England recycling and donating so the lot less is going into landfills now we work all winter and work in the rain we work six days a week and it couldn't get done without these guys these guys do an unbelievable job I've been told by the franchisor that we have one of the best crews in the country here on the North Shore but I just can't say enough good things about the crew they do dirty hard work every day and they're awesome the biggest challenge to any kind of basement remodeling project is keeping water out of the basement making it a dry basement Larry janeski is with us now from basement systems and you kind of written the book or several on this challenge right yeah absolutely I have now I always worry first of all about rain water before I worry about groundwater and this this house is a gambrel which means that the roof really encompasses the second floor and what we've got here is a situation where the front of the house has a gutter the whole width of it and has three conductor pipes coming down to carry away that rainwater you've done a little assessment what do you think yeah well you know gutters have leaves and twigs and so forth coming down over the years and in 1921 when this house was built they put clay pipes going out to the street to take these downspouts take that water out to the street out to a sewer or to the gutter or whatever the storm sewer probably but yeah what's happened is they the pipes underground is completely clogged and when the downspouts is clogged with leaves about three feet up off the ground so yeah what we need to do is take this water to the surface where we know it's going to get away from the foundation and we don't have to worry about clogging so you disconnect the the conductor pipe from the old clay that's in here and then how do you divert the water away from the house a very simple device we're going to be using is a simple conduit called rain chute and we're going to fabricate an elbow for the bottom of this downspout and have this rain shoot take the water seven feet away from the foundation and take it away that's an alternative to kind of getting in there and trying to clear the clay pipe and it may have collapsed on itself over the course of 80 years right that's the simple solution that's right okay well let's go inside the basement and talk about all the other complexities all right so this is the tough part of the job isn't it Larry it is we've got to break the concrete out to get a trench all the way around the perimeter put a drainage system and what's here is not a 6-inch slab it's just an inch and a half or two and there's no reinforcing rod or steel so it's not the end of the world but it's still it's still messy work right and this trench will be around the entire perimeter you already have it coming towards us and then what what happens here well this is the hole for the sump and what we're going to do is channel all the water from the perimeter drainage system to this location and pump it out and away from that now I would have thought the sump would want to be in a corner all on the front elevation of the house and I'd why is it back here well what we did when we arrived at the house is we check with a laser level to see where the low spot is and we found that this spot was 2 inches lower than the highest spot in the house and then the water will be piped out of here the water the sump will go here and the pump will pump it out and we'll have discharge pipes running out in front of that okay now these guys are bringing in a different product here what's this for well the stone walls are damp and they can actually leak water so what we're doing here is we're putting a product called clean space on the walls and this is a vapor barrier and it also drains water behind it down into the drainage system ok so they're just fastening it all right so these are installed every couple of feet and then you've got you don't have to worry about the sheathing falling off it right and and then any water that collects behind there would drip behind it into the trench that's right and we'll talk about the trench in a minute but I want to ask you about crawl spaces is this a product that you could use in a crawl space it is in fact we we line a lot of crawl spaces with this and dirt crawl spaces is a big problem these days people are realizing that the moisture that comes up from the earth is causing such a problem with mold and you know rodents and dry rot yeah I mean a lot of new houses that have just gone up in ten or fifteen years because a lot of the technologies that have been brought in you've got very tight housing envelopes that are creating moisture situations in crawl spaces it can really be a nightmare with rot yeah yeah so there's four steps to solving that problem the first step is get the groundwater problem if there is one in that dirt crawlspace under control with drains and sump pump systems like we're doing here mm-hmm the second step is to line the crawlspace with a material we call this clean space and the blue side goes down and the white side goes up and we line this in a crawlspace across the floor and up the wall so it's totally impermeable no moisture can get through it right and it totally isolates the house from the earth the third step is to seal all outside air leaks and we do that by sealing and events that the crawlspace may have and any other ways that outside unconditioned air can get into the crawlspace so the thinking is that you want a completely sealed space you don't want any ventilation going through there that's right just like your living space would be and then the fourth step is to dehumidified the crawlspace okay all right well we are in a part of the basement that will not be conditioned space it's where the furnaces and it's just going to be kind of like mechanical room where you're standing we're in the area that becomes I guess the bathroom in the laundry room down here right and I guess the walls the difference is right here what's the shiny product is that yeah the we use this product in the unfinished area because it's bright white and nice to look at but this is what we put behind finished walls and this is called thermal drywall system and it'll drain water like the clean space will and it will prevent water vapor from evaporating into the basement space like the other will but this does something the other doesn't and that is it's a radiant barrier it'll reflect the heat that's in the basement back into back into the conditioned space so this it's an energy conservation idea and here you've got a portion of the perimeter that's already been completed explain what we're looking at here yeah we've put into the trench our water guard drainage system and it has holes in the back of it and a flange that sticks up above the floor so that's we're looking at a section of what's down there that's right and the holes in the back of it what do they do for us well they'll let all the water from underneath the floor from the footing wall joint and from the walls into that conduit and drain it all away to them so it'll be pitched off to the sump that's right and then the final step is just putting some cement back in place that's right well it's an elaborate system but I know it works it sure does great thanks Larry all right thanks Bob next week we'll be continuing with our basement finishing project we'll be looking at plumbing PEX tubing also basement systems is putting a perimeter drain in and we're installing a Renee water heater till then I'm Bob Vila thanks for watching

Channel: Bob Vila

Views: 311,425

Rating: 3.9184358 out of 5

Keywords: basement moisture, Bob Vila, basement renovation, basement remodeling, finishing basement, Do it yourself home renovation, how to fix

Id: RN4GqMktanA

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 18 2012